Judith Wright was possibly our greatest poet and a passionate social activist. But a new biography suggests that in writing her family memoirs, Wright avoided evidence that her settler forebears likely participated in the murder of Aborigines.

A portrait of Indian poet and musician Rabindranath Tagore.
Cherishsantosh/Wikimedia CommonsOctober 14, 2016

In a new collaboration, Paul Kelly has joined singer Camille O'Sullivan and pianist Feargal Murray to set 100 years of Irish poetry to music. As the emerald isle is sung into being, the words of Yeats and Joyce still stand out.

One of the most famous attempted rapes in literature: the nymph Daphne turns into a tree to escape the god Apollo.
Apollo chasing Daphne, Cornelis de Vos, 1630. September 13, 2016

There are calls for Ovid's Metamorphoses to be taught with a trigger warning. This 15-book epic is a rollercoaster of a read, with moments of both delicious joy and abject depravity. Like much great art, it was not created to please.

Adjectives have always been out there, mobs of them pressing on the outside walls, their faces against the windows, their shoulders at the doors. They just want to be inside close to all the nouns that…

What is a society without its poets? If all poetry disappeared from our libraries and shelves and virtual depositories tomorrow, would it make much difference to us? If we were forbidden to write poetry…

Your voice carries your character. You might have a light, strained voice, or you might have a deep, rolling voice, but that is not your voice. It is the prop you were given, and you use it as any good…

Celebrated South African poet Adam Small passed away at the age of 79.
Cape Argus/Independent NewspapersJune 28, 2016

One thing bursts out of another. Christine Brooke-Rose, in A Grammar of Metaphor (1958), called it the genitive link. When Ballarat regional poet Nathan Curnow begins his poem The Lighthouse with, nuns…

I am living in a small, remote Aboriginal community where my wife is a school teacher. I have set myself the task of writing a poem a day for a year, and putting this poem on Facebook for my friends who…